Smoother and More Efficient Trajectory Planning

Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 07/13/2012 - 11:59

During his visit as a research engineer at Willow Garage, Ken Anderson improved upon motion planning by developing a more fluid and computationally lighter trajectory smoother along with incremental distance field updates.
The new trajectory smoother modifies the timing intervals to respect velocity and acceleration bounds. This differs from the existing shortcutting techniques, which move the actual point locations. Incremental distance field updates save computation time by only updating the portions of the distance map that have changed.

The iterative trajectory filter and incremental distance field updates are significantly faster than previous methods making motion-planning and safe teleoperation more responsive.

Following his internship stint at Willow Garage, Ken is returning to his home base in Ottawa, Canada to continue his research.